A report from a mother of a swimmer - USA

Brilliant, powerful post @Misstache

@datun

Brock Turner.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/drew-clinton-brock-turner-rape-b1993568.html?amp#aoh=16462434802724&amp_ct=1646243497245&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s

From the recent case detailed in this article, I quote the judge, who seems to have put blame onto everyone apart from the accused -

'That if you put a girl in underwear in a swimming pool and add alcohol then boys will be boys.'

Thank you @Misstache. That was hard to read but I read every word. I'm so sorry and angry that yours and other female athletes stories aren't the ones that are told.

I have a young female relative who is a competitive swimmer (not US) so I recognise much of what you've wrote although I don't think the performative team culture is as pressurised here.

Fucking hell Misstache that was a difficult read. I found my teeth clenching harder and harder the further I got.

It does, however, account for the disgusting sexism that is being displayed, as it appears it's nothing new.

It sounds as though you were 'allowed' to do sport, as though it was a bloody favour, and you had to pay through the nose to do it.

I'm reminded of that disgusting rapist, whose name escapes me, who was caught red-handed raping an unconscious girl, and the judge went very lightly on him, lest his 'sports career be ruined'. The contrast is gutting.

You should broadcast your experiences from the bloody treetops, if you can. I'm sure most people have no real idea how unequal it is across-the-board, even before even the advent of freshly minted cheats and woman haters.

Wow @Misstache. That is very powerful analysis. It also sounds like your college days were borderline abusive. In fact, strike the borderline.

"LT can say they're a woman and everyone has to believe it but when women say we are having debilitating cramps we are told we are imagining it."

This is so depressing.

Thank you, @Misstache. And I am sorry you're having to learn in such a hard way just how shit our society is for so many women. Stay angry. We will beat this.

Great post misstache

It highlights one of the ways we know that most so called progressives don't actually believe that transwomen are women: they don't treat transwomen with disdain, dismiss their concerns, or expect them to exist as mere support humans to males.

That’s what the University of Penn does when it paints any critic of Lia Thomas as being a phobe. A young woman who understands she should not have to get undressed in front of a man or allow him to get out his penis in front of her is not a phobe of anything except for perhaps her own abuse.

From the article linked.

Those Ivy League Universities really are displaying the most disgusting misogyny I think I've ever witnessed in public.

Thank you Misstache for that powerful post - it's so important that women who've been involved in elite sport speak out - especially as younger women competing at the moment are brutally threatened and silenced as we're seeing.

How any rational person can defend what's happening to women's sport is unbelievable.

I actually made an account because this whole thing makes me so mad and there's nowhere you're allowed to talk about it. I've stored all this up so this is going to be long, I'm sorry. I work in a progressive field where you can't say these things.

I was a D1 athlete. Certainly in my sport it was more common than not for athletes not to compete all 4 years. Injury and burnout, mental health, and motivation were all issues that shortened careers. But also, lots of times, athletes had to choose between life priorities. I had teammates in nursing or education who couldn't fit the practice schedule into student teaching or clinical rotation in their senior year. One teammate tried for a while to train alone at 3 in the morning after coming off clinical shift, but she couldn't handle it and ended up choosing her long-term career in healthcare over competing. I had a close friend who got an opportunity to do a prestigious exchange - the coaching staff told her she had to choose between her commitment to the sport and "travel for pleasure" and refused to allow her the season off so she ended up retiring. My point here is that many athletes don't get to compete for 4 years - LT already got 3 years of swimming on the men's team, and like anybody else could have been told to choose between their sport and their other life commitments just like other athletes are. Why couldn't Lia be told that it was great she wanted to transition, but she had to choose whether competing meant more to her or her personal identity and journey? Why is her having a final year to swim so important when so many athletes have to make choices or are forced away from their sport? Even worse, I saw in an article LT was training with the women's team, so LT even got to have the experience of socializing, wearing the bathing suit, whatever it is LT needs to do so badly. LT could have stayed as a practice partner and taken a position as team manager like lots of girls do and cheered on the team and even travelled with them if wanted. LT didn't even have to compete to get the experience of being on a woman's team and socializing as a woman if that's so important.

We had a strict social media policy. We couldn't post anything political, anything "sexy and provocative," anything negative about our school. We weren't allowed to go to protests on campus, or get involved with any activism and we were told if we were wearing the gear from our school we needed to not say or do anything controversial or divisive. We were told that expressing ourselves took a backseat to team unity, to the fact we were representing our college, and that our first identity was as an athlete competing for our school. A teammate of mine from club at another college actually left her team because her roommate was raped by another athlete and she wanted to speak out about it. She was silenced by the athletic department and ended up walking away. This is how women are treated when it's our identities, political commitments or self-expression.

We were constantly told that being an athlete was a privilege, that we signed up to represent our school and that came with responsibility. But suddenly with LT everyone has to bend over so LT can have the experience of swimming as a woman for a year? What happened to telling athletes that you make all kinds of sacrifices of yourself and telling LT either to transition and swim on the men's team one more year, or to transition and give up swimming if transition was more important? Why is it only LT's fulfillment in life that matters when women are literally told all the time that it was the team and sport that mattered more than anything we wanted.

Also, I had really bad periods as a young woman. My mother is an immigrant from a conservative country so she didn't know that birth control could be used to control cramps, and it took years before I knew that and could go by myself, so I spent years training through really awful pain. Even worse, when I got to college I started randomly getting cramps when I didn't have my period. If I stopped right away the moment it started and rested it would go away after a while and I could continue, but if I tried to keep going, it would turn into stabbing pains, vomiting, even passing out. I had no idea what was wrong. It would just happen seemingly out of nowhere. In practice I could stop, but if it was a bad day during a competition, I couldn't perform. My coach basically thought I was lying because doctors couldn't find a reason. Because of this, my progress in college wasn't what I would have wanted for my athletic career.

After I finished competing, I kept training in my sport for myself and it kept happening. Years and years later on a message board for my sport, a woman posted about having the same issue and asking for help. A bunch of us women posted saying that we had this too and had never heard of anyone else having it and how hard and awful it was. Finally, a woman posted in the thread that it was a symptom of endometriosis and gave us warmup exercises and advice. I had no idea! Us women were so relieved, but it was so upsetting that so many of us had struggled for years and had our careers impacted because doctors don't care about women's health and everyone thinks women are lying.

LT will never experience that! LT will never have to train through cramps and vomiting and pray that your period holds off for championships. LT will never be accused by coaches of lying about LT's body! LT can say they're a woman and everyone has to believe it but when women say we are having debilitating cramps we are told we are imagining it.

This makes me so mad. I can't believe in 2022 we have to pretend that the only reason men outperform women in sports is women don't try hard enough. Why would countries bother having doping programs when all you would need is women to stop being lazy and could shave 10% off your times? Presumably, even 2% more effort would translate into dominating everything. So countries would rather risk being sanctioned for drugs instead of just training harder? I can't believe people are seriously arguing it's feminists who are sexist because "we believe women suck at sports." The whole point is we fight to not be compared to men! Men in my sport used to whine about how women got scholarships for times they could run in junior high school. We had to constantly deal with sexism, and now we're being told that actually there's no real performance gap at all?

Also, women's teams have so much more emotional labour! The guys could pretty much train, and their team bonding was maybe a BBQ or something. Nobody even cared about their GPAs as long as they stayed eligible. As women, we couldn't just go to practice. We were expected to keep high grades so our team would be recognized as scholar-athletes. We had to go to constant team dinners, decorate each other's lockers for everyone's birthday, decorate the seniors lockers before every meet, mentor new freshmen, and on and on. I got pulled aside and lectured my freshman year for "not cheering loudly enough" and then I got lectured and threatened with discipline for being too introverted and studying too much on road trips because I wasn't "putting enough energy into my teammates." My friend had depression and the coaches shamed her in front of everyone for not being positive and perky enough. Men get to be "focused" and "aggressive" and "in the zone," but women are held to sexist standards of being perfect at everything, smiling, being the nicest friend, constantly doing emotional labour, etc. We actually got punished as a team if our coaches thought we weren't being smiley and positive enough at meets or sulking about results. Men never have these expectations - it makes me mad that LT is treated like being on a women's team is like some sleepover party when it's actually a ton of emotional pressure and women often aren't really happy but have to mask it. So now LT needs to "socialize" as a woman? Is LT being punished for stressing out her teammates when women are lectured for not cheering enough?

I have so much more to say but this is already a novel, lol. Thank you for having this space, I really needed to vent.

I am surprised that uni swimmers don’t have to be members of US Swimming though (hence Thomas getting to compete).

Heart breaking

Why do we always see photos of this swimmer from the waist up? Or with strategically placed flags or towels? If this type of inclusion is so good and so right, show this swimmer in all their glory including the size of their thighs and slimness of their hips compared to their shoulders etc. Show the entire shape of a competition-winning swimmer so everybody knows what shape to aspire and train to to win swimming competitions.

If Lia's times are that good, will she make the US team? I don't know if all their team trials are like the Olympic ones where you compete at a set meet and the top 2 on the day get selected, no matter what.

I think there are World Swimming Champs this summer so I am wondering if Lia will be competing there?

A good article based on the talk. Worth it for the headline alone.

University of Pennsylvania Systemically Abuses Young Women By Forcing Them to Compete with and Undress In Front Of a Man Who Physically Humiliates Them and Makes Them Call Him a Woman

Hearing about the women swimmers told to be silent about how they are affected, it's just the worst. No misogyny there, nosiree.

So when we hear that girls and women are fine with this, that they don't complain, that their lack of complaining shows that they are ok with it, now we know it's because the girls and women who are affected have been told that they are not allowed to speak up about the negative effects on them.

On the off chance that anyone related to this is reading MN…we hear you and stand by you! This is so unfair and it makes me angry on behalf of the girls and women who are being forced to experience this.

It's the worse type of injustice and on top, the swimmers are being not just silenced but coerced into pretending they support it.

The swimmers are young-they shouldn't have to fight this-but their parents sure as hell can. Bravo that Mum.

As the female swimmers careers have been destroyed what do they have to lose by speaking out?

*paralympics

However, how useful that is for trans athletes might be in question. Chances are biological women won't be competitive and if the transwomen are taking hormones they won't be at the top of their game. So men would likely still dominate.

To me, if there are going to be elite type sports for transwomen or transmen with medical interventions it would be best done within the parolympics framework.

I don't believe people who claim to think trans women are literally women. They're lying. Either performatively, for social cachet, or because they think it's funny, or because they're scared not to say 2+2=5. But they're lying. And they know they are, which is why they get really cross.

It's heart-breaking listening to that mother. The level of open misogyny being expressed by the swim powers-that-be is so fucking depressing. Women are blatantly being shown how much they're worth.